For our next game sent to us as part of being a Blogger Board Game Club member, we got to play with Ticket to Ride Europe. I expect that this is similar to the original Ticket to Ride except that this one is based on European cities. The aim of this game is to claim as many routes connecting two cities as possible. The longer the route the more points you score.

The game is for 2-5 players, so perfect for us, as we can all play together. It’s suitable for ages 8+ but my 7-year-old grabbed the concept of it the quickest. The instruction book is a booklet and there are quite a few rules, so feels very overwhelming at first, but as you play it is really easy to understand. We have played this game a few times now and each time it has taken around an hour.

To start, each player pick a coloured set of trains, they get 4 train cards, and 4 routes. But with the route cards you can choose to discard one or two if you want to. If you manage to complete you route by the end of the game you gain the points on the route card, if you don’t manage to complete it, you lose that amount of points.

As you play the game you get points for making connections between two cities, the more train carriages a route has the more points you get. You each have a colour counter that you move along the rim of the board to keep track of your score.

When a player gets down to only having 1 or 2 trains left in their hand, each player has one final turn and then the game is finished. But, even though the game is finished, we still have more points to add or takeaway. So, we need to add points or take away points for each route card a player as or hasn’t completed. Then each player gets 4 points for each train station they didn’t use, and the player who has made the longest continuous route around the board scores and extra 10 points.

When you finish the game and you think you have won, it can all change!

we all really loved this game and I think it properly is the best game yet, that we have received as part of being a member of the blogger board game club.